Krazy Kat, Ignatz Mouse, and other Coconino County residents travel to Alamoqordo, New Mexico, where Krazy is awed by a giant tower and Ignatz falls for J. Robert Oppenheimer

Krazy Kat: A Novel in Five Panels (Collier Fiction)

Literature & Fiction

Cantor, Jay

Humor & Satire

Collier Books

A thought-provoking, sometimes heartbreaking sequence of stories based on a group of real people held together by their love of Franz Kafka. Here friends, fans, and lovers find themselves haunted by the death of the great author. Imbued with a gravitas and dark irony that recall Kafka’s own work, these stories nonetheless also bear the singular imaginary stamp and the keen psychological and emotional insight that have marked all of Jay Cantor’s writing.

Forgiving the Angel: Four Stories for Franz Kafka (Vintage Contemporaries)

United States

Vintage

From the much-praised author of Krazy Kat and The Death of Che Guevara, the tumultuous story of a group of friends growing up idealistic, radical, and romantic in the sixties and seventies. We enter their lives in 1960 as a sixth-grade class of Great Neck kids—most of them Jewish—learns for the first time, in horrifying detail, about the Holocaust, with its moral imperative to “make justice” in the world. When the older brother of one of the students is murdered in Mississippi during Freedom Summer, they think they have found their mission, and when they receive letters from him seemingly written after his death, a heady mystical dimension is added that impels them into the civil rights and peace movements, joining their lives to a multitude of others. Among the huge cast of characters: a boy-genius comic-book artist, who transforms their gang into Superheroes. The lovely long-legged sister of the boy who was murdered and the brilliant kid brother of the black activist killed with him. The gay son of a wealthy art collector, who introduces his friends to the wild and sometimes dangerous New York art scene. The beautiful daughter of a Holocaust survivor, who joins the ultraradical Weathermen; the quantum physics whiz and Christian mystic who becomes her bomb-maker; and a Black Power leader, who will accompany her and others into their last and most extreme act. Great Neck brings us inside privileged Long Island childhoods and into the churches and juke joints and jails of Mississippi, into underground meetings and protest marches fueled by a potent mix of sex, politics, and drugs. It reminds us of the optimism, courage, and dangerous dreams of a generation who sometimes seemed to think they must be superheroes. Above all, Great Neck is the compelling portrait of complex, appealing young men and women shaping and being shaped by the momentous events of their time.

Great Neck

KNOPF

In 1960, a group of friends are plucked from their sixth grade classroom in privileged Great Neck, Long Island and confronted for the first time with the horrors of the Holocaust. They hear a challenge from the past, a cry from history to set the world on a better course; but it is the murder of a much-loved older brother during Mississippi’s Freedom Summer that makes their mission clear. From the front line of the civil rights movement to Andy Warhol’s New York art scene, from comic book superheroes to the violent maelstrom of the Weather Underground, Great Neckimmerses us in a charged time not so long ago, and illuminates the lives of those who were shaped by its energies and ideals. Vigorous, funny, profound and altogether gripping, it is a masterpiece of contemporary literature.

Dramas & Plays

Krazy Kat adores Ignatz Mouse. She sees the bricks he hurls at her head as tokens of love, and each day Ignatz arranges a cunningly different method of delivery for his missile. But when Ignatz and Krazy witness the mega-brick explosion in the desert, Krazy becomes depressed, and refuses to perform. To coax her back to work so they can regain their lost limelight, Ignatz invents his own brand of psychotherapy, orchestrates her kidnapping, and tries to seduce Krazy with promises of stardom from a Hollywood producer. As the mouse confronts the Kat with bewildering new concepts like sex, death, and politics, Ignatz and Krazy begin yearning to become round, for a fullness of body and spirit beyond their two-dimensional realm. Forming an altogether witty and winning counterpoint to George Herriman’s classic comic strip, Jay Cantor’s kinetic novel has become a classic in its own right, one of those masterpieces that creates its own unforgettable universe.

Krazy Kat

In his critically acclaimed epic first novel, Jay Cantor, author of Krazy Kat and Great Neck, draws on history, myth, and his own prodigious imagination to take on the life and death of revolutionary icon Che Guevara. In his now famous progress through modern times, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the scion of a liberal Argentine family, abandoned a medical career to become a revolutionary. A fiery comrade of Fidel Castro’s who joined him in overthrowing the Cuban government of Baptista, Che later broke with Castro to lead a guerrilla movement in Bolivia. As the novel charts Che’s bold evolution, it also offers an incisive look at Latin America’s revolutionary struggles, an exploration of the nature of truth and storytelling, and a brilliant exegesis of the psychology of radical activisim.

The Death of Che Guevara

From one of our most thought-provoking and admired writers, a brilliant, beautiful, and sometimes heartbreaking group of stories based on a circle of real people who are held together by love of their friend Franz Kafka. The sequence opens with Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and literary executor, telling us about Kafka and Dora Diamant, their love growing stronger even as Kafka is dying of tuberculosis. Kafka talks with Brod about forgiving the Angel of Death, but Brod wonders if Franz is really talking about Brod’s forgiving Kafka for the predicament he’s put him in, having instructed Max to prove his love for Franz by burning the work Brod most admires: Franz’s unpublished stories. Next there is a brief interlude—perhaps a lost Kafka story, or is it a story about a lost Kafka story which is perhaps itself masquerading as one of the things that in anger Brod neither burned nor published? The story that follows tells of Dora’s marriage to the militant German Communist Lusk Lask and his attempt to break the hold of the angelic Kafka on his wife’s imagination by giving her a daughter. We watch this family in its move to the Soviet Union to escape Hitler, and as Dora and her daughter flee the Soviet Union to escape Stalin, leaving Lusk behind in the Gulag. Later, when Lusk tries to connect with his daughter again, the Angel Kafka seems once again to stand in his way, a force in his daughter’s life that seemingly destroys as it sustains. In the last story we meet Milena Jasenska, another of Kafka’s lovers, and Eva, the woman who, after surviving Stalin’s camps, meets Milena in a Nazi concentration camp and is reborn in this hell through her love for her, though perhaps trapped there in memory because of that love as well. By the end, these moving love stories with Kafka as their presiding ghost have told the calamitous story of Europe in the Century of the Camps. Imbued with a gravitas and dark irony that recall Kafka’s own work, these stories nonetheless also bear the singular imaginary stamp and the keen psychological and emotional insight that have marked all of Jay Cantor’s fiction.

Forgiving the Angel: Four Stories for Franz Kafka

A fictionalized account of the life and death of revolutionary Che Guevara details his growth as a radical, his role as a military and ideological leader of the Cuban revolution, and his death in the mountains of Bolivia

Death of Che Guevara

Krazy Kat, Ignatz Mouse, and other Coconino County residents travel to Alamogordo, New Mexico, where Krazy is awed by a giant tower and Ignatz falls for J. Robert Oppenheimer

Krazy Kat: A Novel in Five Panels

Alfred.A. Knopf

Essays discuss American leftist thought of the sixties, the role of the artist, documentary films about the Holocaust, historical fiction, jazz, and the marriage of low and high art

On Giving Birth To One's Own Mother: Essays on Art and Society

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cantor, Jay. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Cantor, Jay

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cantor, Jay. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Krazy Kat: A Novel in Five Panels (Collier Fiction)

Forgiving the Angel: Four Stories for Franz Kafka (Vintage Contemporaries)

Great Neck

Great Neck

Krazy Kat

The Death of Che Guevara

Forgiving the Angel: Four Stories for Franz Kafka

Death of Che Guevara

Krazy Kat: A Novel in Five Panels

On Giving Birth To One's Own Mother: Essays on Art and Society